Last Hurrahs

“Inspector Bellamy” and “Red.”

The latest Claude Chabrol film, “Inspector Bellamy,” is also his last. He died on September 12th, at the age of eighty. The movie begins with a jaunty tune, whistled in a graveyard, and, as epitaphs go, that blend of gloom and levity seems right. Chabrol bore constant witness to mortality, resigned to the fact that men and women, in the smothering air of society, will continue to find reasons to expunge one another, yet you emerge from his movies neither sunk nor defeated but poised on the brink of good cheer. To the French mind, which hails as practical necessity what we would treat as hypocrisy, any serious anatomist of the bourgeoisie must acknowledge and savor the range of bourgeois joys. Know thine enemy, Chabrol’s movies instruct us; eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you get stabbed, poisoned, or thrown off the edge of a cliff.

No surprise, then, that the first word we see here, after the tombstones, is “bonheur,” or “happiness”—written by the Bellamy of the title (Gérard Depardieu) as he fills in a crossword. (His own name sounds English, and could be misheard by a Frenchman, especially a reader of Maupassant, as “Bel Ami,” or “beautiful friend.”) His subsequent encounters, both crucial to the plot, are with a clerk in a hardware store, Claire Bonheur (Adrienne Pauly), and a fidgety figure in a hotel room, who calls himself Noël Gentil (Jacques Gamblin). That surname, which means “kind,” is false: a sign of things to come. Gentil has asked for Bellamy because he wishes the inspector to hear his confession—the decent cop, in a godless world, having tacitly assumed the functions of a priest. Gentil claims that he has a young mistress; that he killed a homeless man, hoping that the corpse, found in a burned-out car, might be mistaken for his own; and that he wanted his wife to collect the life insurance. Chabrol, in short, is tapping the ancient springs, the ones that will never run dry: love, guilt, and money.

Bellamy is meant to be on vacation, spending time in Nîmes with his wife, Françoise (Marie Bunel). When she asks why he has, in an amateur capacity, taken on the Gentil case, Bellamy says, “The guy interests me. He moves me,” and his answer is sufficient. To be fully alive is to maintain curiosity, moral and sensual, and to follow one’s nose—a task made simpler, perhaps, if you have a nose like Depardieu’s. The whole of him appears to have undergone what economists would call runaway inflation; he puffs and wheezes up and down stairs, his suit settling gently over him like a circus tent. Hand him a flyswatter, pop a fez on his head, and you could be looking at Signor Ferrari, in “Casablanca.” Depardieu understands that the true Falstaffian must be both giant and child, and that the amiable sage, to whom others defer, may himself be open to deceit. Thus, the movie is littered with his gnomic asides (“You’re no original, mon vieux,” he says, as Gentil bemoans his own sins), yet Bellamy himself paws and snuffles at the ravishing Françoise like a baby at the breast. In one scene, he even lets out a hoggish little snort of joy, and we are left to speculate on what neurologists would make of our hero: the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Truffle.

This calculated performance should in no way be confused with coasting. The same goes for the director. It is commonly held that the second half of Chabrol’s career saw him relax his grip, and few would argue that “Inspector Bellamy,” or even more stringent films, like “Merci pour le Chocolat” (2000) and “La Cérémonie” (1995), begins to recapture the tremulous intensity of “Les Bonnes Femmes” (1960) or “Le Boucher” (1970). But relaxation, in any art, is much harder to achieve than it looks, and, besides, there remains an unmellowed briskness in the editing of “Inspector Bellamy,” starting with the establishing shots of Nîmes; one of them, showing its Roman amphitheatre, lasts for less than a second. It brings back an earlier southward trip that Chabrol made, in 1968, for “Les Biches,” set in Saint-Tropez during the winter months. Only he would pick a pleasure ground and then cut it with a chill.

“Les Biches” involved a murder, too, but, as often with Chabrol, it was a suffix to the lives of the characters—a by-product of the passions that defined them. His real theme was the eternal power struggle, with individuals launching raids upon one another’s dignity and breaching the frontiers of the adjacent soul, as though every person were a tiny nation-state. Forty years on, that viewpoint is unaltered. “You think humanity is improving?” Bellamy inquires, in bemusement, of his boozy half brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), who has come to stay. As the new film proceeds, the frailties of its main men—the drinker, the would-be killer, the fat detective—interweave and match. Two men separately exclaim, “Je suis un salaud,” or “I’m a bastard”; two wish to be thought of as “un type bien,” or “a decent guy”; and two die at the wheel of a car. One of the men’s wives recalls how much she liked to see her husband in public, and Françoise says exactly the same of Bellamy. Yet listen to his retort: “I’m proud to be alone with you.”

That is, in its modest way, a remarkable line, especially for Chabrol. More often than not, he has shown us victims left alone with their killers. But Bellamy’s words are a plea for the private life, and this final film—after so many dazzling studies of adultery, such as “La Femme Infidèle” (1969)—is a touching and unfashionable hymn to married love. Bellamy suspects, without foundation, that he may have been cuckolded, and there must surely be days, and nights, when Françoise feels that she is sharing her bed with a walrus, yet they do belong unbreakably together. That may be why the film is dedicated, in part, to the memory of Georges Simenon, who gave us, in the shape of Commissaire and Madame Maigret, the most enduring and believably happy marriage in modern literature. Behind “Inspector Bellamy” lie novels such as “Maigret’s Vacation” (which features a doctor named Bellamy) and “Maigret in Vichy,” both of which show our hero taking it easy in the provinces but finding himself drawn to a local crime as if to a restaurant of repute. Chabrol was never obsessed by the “murder mystery,” any more than Simenon was. For both of them, it was life that remained the mystery; death, like happiness, was merely one clue among many, a fiendish anagram that a good man, given time, could solve.

The sentiment that governs “Red” is best expressed by Ivan (Brian Cox), a tearful Russian brute: “I haven’t killed anyone in years.” Ah, the days of gore. Ivan is sharing a vodka with an old adversary from the C.I.A., Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), whose peaceful, not to say tedious, retirement was interrupted by a late-night social call from a bunch of assassins. Frank took care of them, and now he has set out to discover who sent them, teaming up with homicidal chums like Joe (Morgan Freeman), who has liver cancer, Marvin (John Malkovich), who has issues, and the queenly Victoria (Helen Mirren), who spends her days arranging flowers and baking—although, as she shyly admits, “I take the odd contract on the side.”

Robert Schwentke’s movie, like “The Expendables,” clearly results from a heart-searching recognition, at the loftiest levels in Hollywood, that more should be done to serve the older audience. Why should our mature, more thoughtful citizens be expected to watch loud films full of muscular men in their twenties shooting each other and blowing stuff up? What manner of challenging drama would the middle-aged prefer? And the answer is: loud films full of muscular men in their fifties shooting each other and blowing stuff up.

The good news is that, while “The Expendables” was the kind of product that should be shown to health inspectors rather than critics, much of “Red” is jovial and juvenating. Schwentke gives too much room and credence to his plot, which unearths a dirty conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. (As conspiracies always do; wouldn’t it be refreshing if, for once, they stopped at middle management?) The actors, though, are seasoned enough to trample on the nonsense of the narrative and click into a busy comic rhythm. Malkovich, in particular, radiates a genuine aroma of fruitcake, grinning and frowning like a backwoods Nosferatu. When it is pointed out that, for ordinary people, bloodletting means nothing worse than paper cuts, he replies, less in resentment than with breezy pride, “I mostly get shot.” Yet the final irony of “Red” is that the honors go not to one of its veterans but to Mary-Louise Parker, a stripling of forty-six. She plays a bored clerk at the federal pensions office, a devotee of slushy novelettes, who flirts with Frank on the phone, gets roped into his mad shenanigans, and enjoys every minute, apart from getting duct-taped and cuffed to a motel bedstead. “I was hoping you’d have hair,” she admits, after they meet, and her wry tone is that of the dreamer brought down to earth. Emma Bovary meets Black Ops: why did no one think of that before? ♦